Why reach high when you could pick the low hanging fruit.
Every few months, there’s a new channel demanding your attention and your budget. And every time, we watch brands pull money toward the noise, away from the things that are quietly compounding in the background.
The question we hear most: what is the best new e-commerce strategy to bet on? Our honest answer: stop looking for the new and start mastering the fundamentals.
Here’s what the numbers actually show:
- Email returns up to $45 for every $1 spent
- WhatsApp open rates sit at 98%.
- Abandoned cart emails convert at over 10%.
The brands in the top 10% of ROAS aren’t winning because they found the next big thing. They’re winning because they stopped ignoring the channels that already work.
The fruit is hanging low. Most brands just keep looking up.
Why the best e-commerce strategy is often “boring”
WhatsApp isn’t being ignored because it doesn’t work. In Europe, WhatsApp isn’t a niche app. In Spain and Germany, adoption exceeds 90%. Among 24 to 35 year-olds in DACH markets, it’s above 80%. This is the app people open every single day, not to scroll through content, but to actually talk to someone. The attention there is real and direct in a way that almost no other channel can match right now.
And yet most e-commerce brands use it purely reactively. Someone messages with a complaint, someone asks where their order is. The brand responds. That’s it.
The reason most brands haven’t gone further is that WhatsApp feels personal in a way that makes marketers nervous. Sending a promotional message on WhatsApp feels intrusive and honestly, it can be, if you do it wrong.
But that nervousness is also what makes it valuable. Because here’s the thing: if someone has opted in to hear from you on WhatsApp, their attention is genuinely different from an email subscriber clicking “unsubscribe” on autopilot. The opt-in on WhatsApp means something. People guard that channel. Which means the brands that earn a place there are the ones that actually get read.
The results reflect that. Parfumado, the Dutch perfume subscription brand, built their entire customer relationship on WhatsApp. Instead of pushing promotions, they created personalized quizzes that helped customers find the right scent, all inside the app. It works because WhatsApp forces you to be useful, not just loud. And when you’re useful, people actually respond.
The numbers from other brands back that up. Takko Fashion ran a WhatsApp campaign with in-store coupons and saw a nearly 37x ROAS. SNOCKS built a cart abandonment flow on WhatsApp and generated 6x more revenue per message compared to their other channels. And with open rates sitting at 98% versus email’s 20%, you start to understand why.
But WhatsApp is more than just a conversion tool for established markets; it is the ultimate bridge to building trust in new, digital-forward territories. We saw this firsthand when we helped the iconic streetwear brand Patta with their entry into the Nigerian market. In a region where traditional European e-commerce rules simply don’t apply, we positioned WhatsApp not as a side-channel, but as the central transaction hub and the beating heart of the community.
Read the full case study on how we launched Patta in Lagos using a WhatsApp-first strategy.
The cart abandonment email that shouldn’t have a discount
About 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Baymard Institute estimates there’s roughly $260 billion in recoverable revenue sitting in those carts, not lost forever, just paused.
Abandoned cart emails are still one of the highest-converting automations in e-commerce, with open rates around 41.8% and conversion rates above 10%. Most brands know this and have some version of a recovery flow running.
What most brands don’t know is that the first email in that sequence, sent within one hour with no discount, often outperforms the ones with 10% or 15% off. By leading with a discount, you’re training your own customers to abandon carts on purpose. A smarter e-commerce strategy is simpler: send the first email fast, make it feel personal, and let the product do the work. Save the offer for the people who genuinely needed a reason to come back.
Three-email sequences consistently generate 69% more revenue than single emails. The sequence matters. The timing matters. In our opinion the discount is the last tool you reach for, not the first.
The broader problem isn’t awareness, it’s attention
I don’t think brands are making uninformed decisions. I think they’re making decisions based on what’s visible. New channels come with press coverage and agency pitches. WhatsApp and email don’t have hype cycles, they just have results.
Right now, 71% of e-commerce ad spend flows to four platforms. The brands winning on economics are usually the ones who’ve built something on top of channels they actually own, where the algorithm doesn’t decide your reach.
To optimize your e-commerce strategy, you don’t have to ignore what’s new. Agentic commerce is real and it will matter. But don’t abandon the channels that are already working while you wait for the next thing to prove itself. Start by picking the low hanging fruit.
